Royal Canin crowd-sources pet calendar to enhance digital footprint

Brand

Royal Canin

Agency

TrackDDB

Objectives

Track DDB’s objective was to reach out and touch the lives of pet lovers without detracting from Royal Canin’s core of refraining from humanizing pets in the pursuit of their nutritive care.

The dawn New Year 2016 was identified as a perfect opportunity to create a long-lasting platform that could draw pet owners into engaging with the brand.

During the time of bright new beginnings and resolutions, TrackDDB attempted to craft a new way for Royal Canin to connect to pet lovers. The agency unveiled a unique path to fame for pet parents to show off their pets through the pages of a crowd sourced calendar.

Execution

Based on the principle that ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’, as well as the insight that pet parents love to share pictures of their pets online, TrackDDB realized the opportunity to utilize and leverage the power of a pet’s photograph in a pet parent’s life.

Thus, was born the Royal Canin Pet Calendar 2016, a first-of-its-kind initiative by the brand, exclusively featuring pet photos submitted by fans from across the country.

Pet parents were asked to submit a photograph of their pet cat or dog and garner votes for the same. The most popular submissions would become a part of the calendar.

A microsite – served as the central hub for the campaign. Pet parents uploaded pictures, and received a unique url for their submission. They were encouraged to share this on as many platforms as possible, to get votes and race to the top of the leaderboard. All submissions were showcased in a central gallery as well, where users could browse through and vote.

The campaign was promoted via a multi-channel ad strategy that included Facebook & Twitter promotions (community & influencer outreach), display banners, and targeted sms & email communication to the brand’s consumer database.

Results

With an overwhelming response, the hosting service had to be upgraded thrice to keep up with the traffic. The brand even increased the number of winners from 12 to 50.

Pet owners whipped out their cameras and went click happy, and a total of 1599 photographs were submitted, with 1058 meeting the brand’s guidelines and getting approved. These submissions received a collective 33,229 votes, with the top 50 corralling 11,236 of these, to emerge as the winners.

During this three-week period, the campaign reached over 2 million people, resulting in substantial brand engagement. There was a 1680% increase in Facebook engagement and 2240% increase in reach, as compared to the previous month. The campaign website had more than 3,00,000 page views.

The brand even realized the power of mobile, with 80% of all traffic (submissions and votes) coming from handheld devices.

Royal Canin stirs away from traditional advertising and has a comparatively nascent footprint on social media, with this crowd-sourced initiative the brand managed to create engagement, loyalty, and positive sentiment.